The End of Grandma
Johnny Fuentes

I ONCE house-sat for a poet. This was the summer I spent working on my master’s thesis, an unwieldy creative project to which I dedicated the entirety of each morning: I’d wake up early, walk to the library, write, and then return home to my studio apartment. However, the results were usually dismal regardless of the effort, and out of anxiety, I’d usually spend the remainder of the day doing “research" in hopes of being inspired. I remember reading an article about quintuplets, who, through some genetic anomaly, were all born with abnormally long tongues that needed to be “snipped” in order for the children to properly eat.
I didn’t know the poet very well, even though she taught at the university where I worked as a graduate assistant. Everyone in my cohort had left for the summer, aside from me and another student, who declined the poet’s initial offer, and so the poet emailed me. I agreed. 
The poet didn’t have air conditioning, so she had arranged in each room an electric fan that, once turned on, would slowly pivot from side to side, as if saying “no.” 
On my first evening there, I decided to bake a boneless, skinless chicken breast and ten spears of asparagus. I was trying to eat healthy because of my acid reflux, a recommendation my doctor had given me after telling him my diet consisted of mostly cereal, heat-up pizzas, and potstickers. Even though I’m not a great cook, the meal turned out nice enough. The poet had made available olive oil, minced garlic, preserved lemons, and artisanal sea salt from a little ceramic jar that looked handmade, possibly Japanese—the lid had a little swirl that looked like calligraphy. I ate in the dining room flanked by bookcases full of books I’d never read. 
After starting in, I thought it would be better to eat outside on the patio and make a thing of it. In the center of the lawn was a tree with dark and leafy limbs that meshed together and dangled overhead. I wondered if the poet ever ate outside in the evening and thought of the tree as a veil, but I figured that was cliché. Anyways, earlier in the kitchen, bugs had knocked against the window; the one I’d seen crawling across the glass looked like it had two little paddles for wings and needles for legs, and I already had a welt on my ring finger, right above my knuckle, from a mosquito bite. Moreover, I’d watched through the same window as a man shat next to a dumpster behind a pour-over coffee shop. I decided to stay in the dining room with the books. 
I was finishing the last of the asparagus when I got a text from my mom: Grandma may be passing away.
Oh no! I texted back.
That’s ok. She has been miserable. 
Yes, she has.
I hadn’t seen my grandma in a couple of years. I remember her being very large and then, suddenly, deflating. As a child, I had watched her poke insulin into her stomach and tread around her house using a wooden cane with a duck head carved into the handle. The duck had beady eyes and a bill that was made to look like it was smiling. Later, she was kicked out of the nursing home because she kept belting an orderly on the thigh with it. Weeks before being kicked out, my mom and I visited her.
“I have boxes of chocolates I ordered from TV in my closet,” grandma said. 
“Don’t act like you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re more than aware,” my mom said, rolling her eyes. 
“If I don’t leave this place soon, I’m going to eat each and every one of those chocolates.” 
I opened the closet. Grandma wasn’t lying. Stacked in the corner were boxes, white boxes with lush red labels. “The lady next door has a canary. I saw it land on her finger. They looked very happy together. Have you considered a canary?” I asked. 
My mom laughed. 
We sat on the couch and watched The Departed together and then left. 
Afterward, on our drive home, my mom laughed while telling me how grandma had once hit her over the head with a frying pan. “It was like an episode of Tom and Jerry,” was how she described the incident, and then she said, “She has been miserable.”  
“Yes, she has,” I said. 
In the poet’s house, I lay face down on the couch, staring at the floor. She didn’t have a TV, so I brushed the cat, who had just come out from hiding. We played a game in which I held a brush above her, and she’d walk under it while arching her back, essentially brushing herself. A pile of fur gathered on the floor and then the cat left. I watched the pile flutter in the current of the fans. 
It would’ve been nice to undress and let the fans hit me. My legs were sweaty, but I didn’t because maybe cameras were planted throughout the house; maybe I was the subject of some creative project, one like my thesis but better, and even though I knew this thought was irrational, it lingered. I imagined my naked body broadcasted to other poets around the world. It would be titled: “A Testament to White Trash.” So, I went about my business as if someone were watching me. 
Later, I took some sleeping pills and quickly fell asleep, pretty early, before ten I think, but I woke up a few hours later completely energized, as if I had slept for days. I put on my jeans, shirt, and shoes and left the house. As I made my way down the street, I glanced into shop windows, one a plant store, another filled with typewriters, but as I made my way downhill, the shops quickly gave way to abandoned houses. 
Further down the street, a man without a shirt pedaled a bicycle. He was heading toward me, slow and steady, his legs working like the pistons in a machine. The chrome frame beneath him shimmered, and his pedaling synchronized with the rising and falling of a swastika tattooed on his chest—the same kind my cousin had. Just as he passed me, the man’s mouth gaped into a wide yawn, and I recalled an article I’d researched about gapes, how the gaping mouth, with its ability to convey multiple emotions simultaneously, was a common feature within Baroque art, given the period’s heightened interest in psychology. Similarly, many gapes were found echoed in the architecture of the time as well. The oval, reminiscent of the gape, was considered more pleasing than the circle. However, historians speculate such architectural niceties were inspired by the “hellmouth,” a mechanical device meant to represent the gates of Hell in medieval plays, and many theorists conclude the hellmouth is symbolic of the anus.

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Johnny Fuentes lives and writes in Oregon. He received his MFA from Miami University.

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